Passage, Connie Willis

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Bantam, 2001, 780 pages, C$10.99 mmpb, ISBN 0-553-58051-5

Sometimes, I get the feeling that I’m the only SF fan on the face of the planet who’s not a hundred-and-ten percent fan of Connie Willis’ work. Whenever I admit doubts about her stories, people spit at me, dogs bite my ankles and even babies stare in my direction with disgust.

Well, okay, maybe not, but part of Willis’ skill is that she makes even the haters hate themselves. After all, isn’t she the smartest, the funniest, the best? Her story certainly have charm to spare: every word, every sentence is carefully put in place to make us dance like puppets to the tune she’s singing. Her stories are often funny on the page, but they’re developed with serious rigor. A major novel like Passage is a superb showcase for those skills.

Just take a look at the premise: It’s a romantic comedy in which a psychologist studies patients experiencing Near-Death Experiences. Major cognitive dissonance right there, and that’s even before reading a single line of the novel.

Even a few chapters in, the usual Willis trademarks are obvious: The frazzled protagonist struck in an amusing nightmare of overlapping complications; the copious amount of pop-cultural references; the amusing succession of slapstick comedy, hilarious exasperation and romantic entanglements. The plot takes time to emerge, but it does with increasing darkness, as the protagonist teams up with a researcher who has found a way to safely induce NDEs to volunteers. But something makes the volunteers run away, and soon it’s up to the protagonist to submit herself to her own study… with spectacular results.

Objectively, it’s far from being a bad book: The compelling nature of Willis’ prose is as sharp as it’s ever been, and the comic complications keep piling up at a frenzied pace. The SF elements of the story are initially slight, but gradually acquire more and more heft. The many characters are leisurely developed and eventually…

…eventually, we come to realize that the novel’s 780 pages are its own worst problem. There is no economy to the telling, and the repetitive nature of some complications start to take its toll. The story hangs in mid-air for a long time, asking far too much indulgence for missed phone calls, silly character decisions and an obstinate refusal to proceed forward. I often complain that hundreds of pages could be cut from some novels, but it’s not an exaggeration in Passage‘s case: A novel half as long could have done wonders for the story’s impact.

But perhaps there’s a reason to the lethargy created by this pile of words: Willis seldom shies away from emotional sucker-punches, and there’s a shocking twist a hundred pages from the end that’s both surprising yet foreshadowed by dozens of small hints. It leads to a conclusion that will play really well with some, and remind a self-hating minority of doubters that blatant emotional manipulation remains one of Willis’ most accomplished strength as a writer.

I have no doubt that my reaction to the novel is idiosyncratic and that it will go over really well with other readers: Willis’ bibliography is crammed with works (Doomsday Book, “Even the Queen” , “All my Darling Daughters”, etc.) that appeal to a certain segment of the readership while leaving others free to cry “emotional manipulation!” between fits of self-doubts. Passage thus fits in an enviable lineage: it’s the typical mixture of farce and tragedy, skillfully put together but not impervious to a cock-eyed “oh, really?” reaction. I suspect that I will appreciate this novel a lot more once I’m past my terrible thirties.

But even confused haters will recognize that Passage is a powerful piece of work: risky, humane, brilliant and well-researched. The length is a problem, but maybe only to those who already have reservations about the novel as a whole: Others may see it as much more of a good thing. One thing is for sure: Passage doesn’t make it any easier to be critical of Willis’ work.

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Jumper, Steven Gould

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Tor, 1992 (2008 reprint), 344 pages, C$9.99 mmpb, ISBN 978-0-7653-5769-4

One of the few good things about the big-screen Hollywwod JUMPER movie is how it brought back in wide circulation Steven Gould’s original Jumper, a much-lauded Young-Adult SF novel that long proved elusive to casual buyers.

Now that the novel is once more widely available in a tie-in edition, the usual games can begin:

  • How much of the novel was faithfully adapted? (Not much.)
  • Do the changes improve upon the original? (Sometimes, maybe.)
  • Do the changes betray the artistic intent of the original story? (Indeed.)
  • Is the book better than the movie? (Yup, but you already knew that.)

Little surprise here.

But while it’s fun and haughty for book-lovers to dismiss the movie adaptation and make of the original novel some kind of flawless gem, it’s more interesting to note that if the film is a piece of hard-to-like nonsense, the novel also has a number of significant flaws. Some of the movie’s most intriguing elements do work better than the book, at least in presenting a plot framework that avoids unforgivable coincidences.

(Also: while it’s unfair to the author to speak of his novel by looking at it through the lenses of the movie, that’s the only way it’s going to be read for a few years. These are the realities of the cultural marketplace, and they’re included in the royalties earned by the tie-in edition.)

But let’s start at the beginning: Seconds away from being beaten by his abusive father, teenage narrator David Rice discovers that he can teleport to locations he can picture in his mind. His first jump takes him back to the local public library (which is also the case in the film, but never explained as “the protagonist’s first thought of a safe haven”) where he immediately starts plotting his escape from a life that has nothing to offer him. It’s a rough process: Gould puts his protagonist through tough decisions and harrowing situations as he experiments in order to find the limits of his powers.

A major thematic deviation from the film takes place as David robs a bank to sustain himself: In the film, it’s a largely entertaining act with little moral consequences for the hedonistic protagonist; in the book, it’s an unpleasant but necessary action that causes even more trouble for David.

This widening ethical gap only grows larger when the main plots are set in motion. In the film, a secret group of anti-jumper “paladins” hunt down David, drawing him in an underworld of battling jumpers and paladins. In the movie, David gets a personal reason to hunt down airplane hijackers and fight terrorists.

Surprisingly, it’s tough to decide which plot-line is better: The book’s terrorist thread is precipitated by a coincidence so unlikely that it’s initially hard to accept that the author would use it to move forward the second half of the book. The gradual transformation of David into an anti-terrorist vigilante is equally hard to take seriously: at the rate airplane hijacking take place in the novel, few major airlines would be able to operate. Some of the pre-Internet details (such as using the services of a clipping agency) are now quaintly amusing, but there’s no denying that there are other reasons why this 1992 novel hasn’t aged so well in a post-9/11 world. The movie’s clichéd jumpers-versus-paladins storyline at least has the merit of moving the action along with family intrigue and a decent amount of mystery that is, alas, left to be revealed in an increasingly less-desirable sequel.

But if Gould’s original vision had one undeniable advantage, it’s in the thematic richness and maturity revealed by David’s quest for vengeance. There are some very nice portraits of anger and how it’s transferred over from covert to overt targets. David is not a happy young man and his gift for teleportation only papers over the problem for a time, until it grows so overwhelming that he’s tempted to go much too far. Despite the tortured plot points, the dramatic arc of the novel is completely satisfying, whereas the movie’s protagonist doesn’t even have morals or ethics to guide him. And there’s no comparison between the twin romantic plot threads in book versus movie, not when the protagonist of the film is such a repellent bastard.

Despite some of the film’s most hair-raising action sequences, the book definitely keeps an edge when comes the time to consider the smaller details of the action. Informed by the merciless standards of genre Science Fiction, the novel goes in intricate detail to describe the mechanics and consequences of teleportation: it helps that David is smart and able to improvise in order to put all chances on his side. Meanwhile, the film operates without consistency or elementary logic, contradicting and breaking its own rules. The two may not be closely related, but there are things in the movie that won’t make sense until you read the book. (And there are things that won’t make sense no matter what.)

But anyone who’s made it this far in the review without being interested by any book-to-movie comparison can take comfort in the fact that Jumper, even with its plotting flaws, is a truly enjoyable Young-Adult Science Fiction novel. Its heart is at the right place, the writing is instantly compelling from the very first page, and if aspects of it aren’t as credible now, it remains a small gem. Now that it’s not that hard to find a copy, do yourself a favor and have a look.

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The Princes of the Golden Cage, Nathalie Mallet

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Night Shade, 2007, 298 pages, C$10.99 mmpb, ISBN 978-1-59780-090-7

Here’s my obligatory disclaimer: I really wanted to enjoy this book. I first met Nathalie Mallet at Vancouver’s V-Con convention in October 2007, but really started talking to her at the following month’s World Fantasy Convention in Saratoga. Like me, Mallet is a fluently bilingual French-Canadian living outside Quebec. Quite unlike me, she now has a novel on sale from an American publisher: The Princes of the Golden Cage, free copies of which were available by the boxful to WFC attendees.

It’s a noteworthy book for several reasons, the most intriguing of which being that this is Night Shade’s first mass-market paperback publication. Traditionally known as a specialty trade paperback house, Night Shade now aims for a bigger market with this new format, and it speaks much of their confidence in the novel to have selected it as their first title in this new audience-friendly format.

But you can imagine my anxious hope when The Princes of the Golden Cage finally ended in the pole position of my reading stack: What if I didn’t enjoy the book? After all, fantasy isn’t my genre of predilection: a lot of it bores me, when I’m not being quietly infuriated by the clichés of the genre.

Since I’m more likely to stay silent than to be overly critical of friends and good acquaintances, you can guess by the existence of this review that I found quite a number of things to like about the book.

The first obvious distinction is that this fantasy is set in a different mold, partly inspired by Arabian mythology and partly shaped by the demands of palace intrigue. The hero of the tale, Prince Amir, is the son of the Sultan, but that’s not much of a distinction given where he lives: an imperial palace where more than a hundred of the Sultan’s sons subtly compete for the title of heir while they await their father’s death. You can imagine the posturing, but Amir has opted out of the race: by focusing on academic pursuits, he hopes to stand aside from the melee and live a quiet life. Alas, events soon run against him: When his brothers start dying in mysterious, perhaps occult circumstances, he is summoned and put in charge of discovering the murderer. So much for keeping a low profile.

Further complications arise when he befriends another young man who seems to enjoy an unusual amount of freedom. Then there’s princess Eva, already betrothed and yet so irresistible…

It’s a fantasy, it’s a romance, it’s an adventure, it’s a mystery, it’s a big tangled web of intrigue and it’s almost immediately compelling. Prince Amir is a fine nebbish protagonist and while he’s not much of a hero at first (I wondered at times if the author wasn’t trying to pull off a BIG TROUBLE IN LITTLE CHINA inversion of sidekick/hero roles), he’s instantly likable and earns his own little triumphs. The twists and counter-twists piles up almost too neatly with the metronome precision of a tight movie script, but the overly-complicated ending ties it all together with a bow and a nice flourish.

This being said, it’s regrettable that Night Shade goofed up its new paperback production process and let an unacceptable number of copy-editing mistakes in the book: The number of curious word substitutions clearly shows that a spell-checked manuscript isn’t necessarily free of errors. (Yes, I’m deeply aware of the irony in pointing this out on a review site that riddled with such mistakes. I know, I know.)

I may not be the ideal or most dispassionate reader for this book, but I enjoyed it more than I thought and almost as much as I had hoped for. It may have a few first-novel rough edges (and the imperfect copy-editing makes me wonder if it wasn’t rushed in production), but I rarely enjoy fantasy novels as much as this one. A sequel, The King’s Daughter is already scheduled for mid-2008: does that mean I’ll have to take a chance and look in that “fantasy” section of the bookstore?

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Monster Island, David Wellington

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Thunder’s Mouth, 2006, 282 pages, US$13.95 tpb, ISBN 978-1-56025-850-6

The recent revival of written zombie horror fiction has its leading lights: Brian Keene, Max Brooks and David Wellington. Monster Island was a sensation even from its beginning as a free serial on Wellington’s blog: The short punchy chapters, consciously written for maximum cliffhanging impact, drew in readers, raised Wellington’s profile and eventually led to a book publication deal for the book. (The online version is still freely available if you’re curious.)

Four years later, as the media landscape has latched on zombies as their New Favorite Monster, is Monster Island still worth a read? Does it keep its interest at a time where books, video games, and even blogs post like it’s the end of the world, is Monster Island a charming curiosity of historical value or a horror novel that is destined to endure?

While it’s still too early to judge its historical posterity, Monster Island still manage to hold its own in 2008. Its audience may not be as hungry for zombie stories as it once was (zombie fatigue may be setting in as even the local cineplex has its zombie-movie-of-the-month club), but the novel itself is a punchy, modern take on zombie tropes with enough winks, chills and screams to keep it all interesting.

The novel barely deigns to describe the zombie apocalypse event itself: it begins a few weeks later, as an African warlord is running out of HIV medicine. The narrator, an ex-UN official reluctantly working for her, thinks he knows where useful medicine may still be found: the United Nations HQ medical clinic in New York. Getting there, of course, isn’t simple: The Hudson is choked with dead bodies, and the island of Manhattan is overrun by zombies. Even the heavily-armed teenage girls traveling protecting the narrator are outnumbered. But there aren’t just zombies on the island: there are bizarrely-organized human survivors, an unusually intelligent zombie leader and a bog mummy with bigger plans.

Wellington’s contribution to the zombie mythology is that it’s oxygen deprivation that makes zombies the dumb schmucks that they are in fiction. If, say, a clever medical student deliberately induced death while hooked up to an oxygen machine, then the resulting zombie would keep most of its mental faculties. Presto: one capable antagonist! There are further complications, of course: Wellington can’t resist stepping beyond the zombies to suggest a far grander mythology at play, one with much bigger implications than the good-old undead-coming-back-to-life stuff.

But the meat of the tale, so to speak, is in the way the narrator’s team encounters and fights the zombies in Manhattan. Here’s where Wellington has the most fun, with advanced weaponry, bulletproof zombies (revived SWAT officers with protective armor), lively confrontation and horror-show encounters with a group of humans led by a self-proclaimed president with more clichés than good sense. Wellington’s a darkly funny writer, and some of Monster Island is tough to digest until one realizes that entire sequences are designed to be macabrely amusing.

Given the novel’s fast pacing and scattershot approach, it’s not a surprise if some elements don’t work as well, or if it stretches the bound of plausibility even for a zombie novel. The bloggish origins of the novel show in how this could have been a tighter novel with a bit more editorial attention and consistency-checking to make sure that the rules of the story remained consistent from beginning to end. The gradual shift away from the zombie genre into a more general horror framework may disappoint some readers.

But the energy of the story and its fast pace do a lot to keep it from becoming dull. As we wait for the zombie craze to crest and go away, the stories with the best chances of surviving are those that will offer the best storytelling experience, not necessarily the most consistent genre element or the most radical innovations. Monster Island is still worth a read, and I give it good chances that this will still be true in a few years from now.

[March and April 2008: Alas, Wellington's two follow-up novels, prequel Monster Nation and sequel Monster Planet, get sillier and more difficult to enjoy. While Monster Nation (which does describe and explain the zombie apocalypse) has its share of gruesomely enjoyable moments, its conclusion gets increasingly less plausible thanks to increasing doses of mysticism, up to an including a final yadda-yadda about the origins of life, anti-life or whatever. Monster Planet continues in this vein, offering an increasing diversity of critters all jockeying for world domination until is becomes obvious why the book wasn't simply titled Zombie Planet. Unfortunately, Wellington gets more frustrating the deeper he buries himself in metaphysical nonsense: he's never as enjoyable as when he's writing in SF/techno-thriller mode (some of the most fascinating passage of the books are those in which he describes the official military response) and therein lies a suggestion for his next few efforts.]

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Killswitch, Joel Shepherd

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Pyr, 2007, 450 pages, C$17.00 tpb, ISBN 978-1-59102-598-6

Killswitch is the third novel in Joel Shepherd’s “Cassandra Kresnov” series, after Crossover and Breakaway. While I read those first two novels with some interest, I could never find enough things to say about them to justify a full-length review. Worse: those two novels seemed both repetitive and strangely fake in their treatment of their heroine’s problems.

Before explaining why Killswitch is a stronger, more noteworthy novel, let’s review the series so far: In a future where humanity has spread to a number of star systems, the major political lines are between the Federation and the League –two generic names that more or less describe how blandly Kresnov’s feels about them. Kresnov may begin the novel looking like an apolitical party-hard code-slinger, but the truth is more complex: she’s a sophisticated combat android trying to forget her past and fit in the relatively well-functioning multicultural society of Callay. Sadly, things don’t end up working like they should, and a kidnapping by covert operatives end up rousing the interest of Callay’s protection forces. Cassandra may just want to live simply, but her new masters won’t let her shirk away from what she’s been trained for, especially when she proves so devastatingly effective at protecting the president from enemy attacks. The matter of her sentience and legal status having been settled over and over again, she eventually (albeit reluctantly) finds a place as part of Callay’s security forces.

The problem of the first two books aren’t obvious from the previous plot summary, but they stem from them: This is a pretty ordinary set of plot points. Beautiful-but-deadly military androids are fast approaching cliché, and the question of whether a well-functioning robot has rights equal to those of a human is the kind of classic SF question that has long worn out its novelty value. Breakaway seemed to rehash the exact same issues as Crossover did while bringing nothing new to them, either in theme or in plot. While Shepherd’s writing is competent and even exciting when tackling action sequences, it’s hardly spectacular otherwise and doesn’t do much to compensate for the novels’ pedestrian plots. To that one must add the often-unbelievable way Shepherd writes about his heroine: somehow, I doubt that hot lusty females spend as much time thinking about how hot and sex-obsessed they are as males seem to think they do. The barely-repressed lust expressed by Kesnov’s best friend Vanessa smacks more of male wish-fulfillment than actual character development.

But things are different with Killswitch. The plot takes another direction as people from Kresnov’s past come back to cause problems. The political issues from the previous novels are further developed, but this time both Kresnov and the readers care a bit more about who’s right or wrong beyond the obvious statement that terrorism is baaad. It helps that the threat to Kresnov’s continued existence is far more ominous –how could it be otherwise with a kill-switch implanted deep in her neural system? Even the characters seem more fleshed-out, with Kresnov’s relationships deepening. The romantic tension with her best friend is finally discussed, and our heroine earns a very satisfying epilogue. The enviable nature of Callay’s well-adjusted multicultural society continues to be a highlight of the series: Shepherd (an Australian, one notes) paints such a compelling portrait of the planet that I’m tempted to emigrate there despite the risks presented by the series’ ever-ongoing carnival of high-speed pursuits, gun-fights and orbital combat.

The obvious caveat is that readers will have to slog through two repetitive, sometimes indifferent novels before getting some return on their investment with Killswitch. I think it’s worth it, but readers with less interest in politics (or with more attuned gender-wonkery detectors) may balk earlier in the series. As the Cassandra Kresnov sequence seems open-ended, I’m more curious than ever to find out what else Shepherd has in store for his protagonist now that he’s dealt with most of the obvious questions.

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Forty Signs of Rain, Kim Stanley Robinson

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Bantam Spectra, 2004, 358 pages, C$37.00 hc, ISBN 0-553-80311-5

I have already written about my constant admiration of Kim Stanley Robinson’s work before, and things won’t change with this review of Forty Signs of Rain, a unique novel of science-fiction that conventionally shouldn’t work as well as it does, yet holds its own as a superbly entertaining work of fiction.

Robinson, of course, rarely settles for conventional narratives. So when he decides to tackle the subject of global warming (after first glancing at the subject in Blue Mars), he does so by using the best-informed protagonists he could think of: the scientists at work in Washington at the intersection of science and politics. The novel begins as global warming is starting to have its first catastrophic impacts. Meanwhile, a young iconoclastic scientist named Frank Vanderwal is fed up with the bureaucracy and cautiousness of the National Science Foundation where he is finishing his one-year term. His colleague, Anne Quibbler, is busy balancing the demands of motherhood with those of a career even as her husband, Charlie Quibbler, is a stay-at-home dad who moonlights as a scientific advisor to an influent senator. (This senator, Phil Chase, is carried over from Antarctica, but so slightly as to be imperceptible to those who haven’t read Robinson’s previous book.)

These three viewpoint on the issue having been established in all of their rock-climbing, breast-feeding, telecommuting banality, Robinson does not immediately jumps to the chase. Nearly half of Forty Signs of Rain passes before the first shapes of the overarching plot appear. This is a novel of characters, of good ordinary people engaged in science and all of its messy complexity. The inner workings of the NSF are carefully described (usually by Frank, who can’t stand it any more), while the interface between science and politics is probed. This is not the time for heroics, but for careful action. This is also science-fiction as it’s too rarely written: as an exploration of the facets of science as it’s conducted today in the real world.

In doing so, Robinson also slyly attacks one of the hoariest clichés of bad SF: the mad scientist. The characters in Forty Signs of Rain are morally outstanding citizens who feel a moral and ethical need to contribute to society by their expertise. Their goal is a better world for all; their means are a conscience and the elements of the scientific method. With this uplifting novel, Robinson reclaims some much-needed credibility for the SF label in its purest sense, even if the science-fictional elements of the book are slight and subtle.

Besides a few gadgets here and there, only the ending of the book stands as a bit of extrapolation. Yet the biggest irony of Forty Signs of Rain does happens late in the book, as the climax of the story is set in rain-drenched Washington, as a flood of biblical proportions cover the entire capital in meters of sludge and water. What was pure Science Fiction in 2004 turned out to be the unpleasant portent of the real-life flooding of New Orleans barely a year later. Validation of Robinson’s carefully researched novel never seemed more ominous.

But these thematic elements would be wasted without Robinson’s usually delightful prose, which delves so deep into the character’s inner landscape as to reflect their emotional states. The writing occasionally takes on a quality halfway between internal monologue and typical third-person narration, blending a poetry of science with mundane everyday concerns. Just wait until you read the scene where a squirming child interrupts a head-to-head meeting with the president.

Ultimately, it’s this blend of domesticity, sweeping thematic concerns and good old-fashioned political issues that makes Forty Signs of Rain such an unlikely page-turner. For a book in which little actually happens, it’s a delight-a-page experience. Fans of Robinson’s brainier previous work will be absolutely fulfilled by this latest work. Best of all, though, is the feeling that the real story is about to begin in the follow-up, Fifty Degrees Below.

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Vantage Point (2008)

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(In theaters, February 2008) What an odd film: The stunning trailer promised a Rashomon-type assassination thriller with twisty levels of truth. The reality is a lot sloppier: While Vantage Point does offer multiple successive perspective on the same set of events, the impact never goes beyond that of a curious way to present a fairly straightforward thriller. The twists aren’t as impressive as you may think (the identity of a traitor can be guessed early on) and many elements feel forced in order to manipulate a reaction from the audience. The first few minutes are clunky from tons of hesitant exposition, while some elements of the plot never work like they should. There’s an interesting vibe to some of the material (the deliberately dovish president, the nebulous nature of the terrorists, the faint vibe that this may not turn out to be OK), but there’s also a sense that the film isn’t running on all cylinders. Ironically, it’s when the film drops the multiple-viewpoints pretense that it really kicks in high gear: The car chase through the streets of Valencia is good fun (a grim Dennis Quaid really sells the intensity of the pursuit), and the climax does actually work in a certain fashion. But the result seldom rises above its gimmicky flash: the twists are there for the sake of the twists, and if there’s a certain cleverness to it all, Vantage Point still feels as if it’s missing an important chunk.

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Spiderwick Chronicles, The (2008)

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(In theaters, February 2008) With the Potter series in full money-making bloom, studios are racing to cash on other children’s series. The results may often be dire (even with the best of source material, such as The Golden Compass), but Spiderwick manages to be a good-enough example of the form. As three siblings discover the secrets surrounding their new upstate New York house, they realize that there’s an invisible world out there, and that it’s not entirely friendly. Elements of classic fairy mythology are well-used, but it’s the generally unobjectionable script that holds everything together along with capable kid actors and satisfying special effects. The early few minutes aren’t particularly pleasant as the rebellious boy is shown to be well, rebellious, but he soon rises to the occasion presented by the discovery of the house’s secrets. While the plot is generally predictable (including its underwhelming ending), it’s not blatantly idiotic and even manages to hold on to a certain pleasant quality. I particularly enjoyed the sub-thematic content about books and the knowledge they represent. While this won’t become a classic, it’s going to hold up as a pleasant family film that the adults may even like.

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Scaphandre Et Le Papillon, Le [The Diving Bell And The Butterfly] (2007)

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(In theaters, February 2008) I really didn’t want to see this film: Stories of people overcoming physical handicaps to find peace, happiness and Oscar nominations aren’t high on my list of priorities, but when a film gets four such nominations, well, I can always follow the crowd and make an effort. So when I say that the film managed to overcome my own preconceptions, you can figure out that it’s something special. Adapted from the true story of a man almost completely paralyzed by a stroke and left with the control of only one eye, Le Scaphandre Et Le Papillon takes an intensely subjective approach to its subject at first. Thanks to focus issues and staccato movements meant to represent human eye motion, the film sticks the viewer inside the protagonist’s head as he has to figure out how to communicate with the world again. It’s a painful, sometimes horrifying process, minutely detailed while the basics for communications are re-established in far more than the blink of an eye. (I deny anyone not to hyperventilate during one particular scene in which sewing needles are involved.) It’s a brilliant piece of cinema, and it more than establishes the protagonist’s situation before we are allowed, once again, objective camera angles. I don’t think anyone could have expected a better adaptation of nigh-impossible source material. There’s some biting humor through it all, though the film becomes increasingly predictable and conventional the longer it went on. But the result is exceptional (if not always pleasant, at least seldom preachy) and it has a good chance to stick in memory long after the rest of the Oscar-nominated slate of 2007 has faded in memory.

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The Hidden Family, Charles Stross

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Tor, 2005, 303 pages, C$34.95 hc, ISBN 0-765-31347-2

Readers who thought that Charles Stross’ fantasy debut The Family Trade was heavily in clever details, plot twists and smart characters are about to get even more good stuff for their money with this follow-up: The Hidden Family piles on more complications, more developments and even more worlds to explore.

This fantasy series’s premise is that a genetic trait in some humans allow them to travel between parallel worlds, at the price of terrible headaches. The first to discover this ability were inhabitants of another world, one that, by the early twenty-first century, is still stuck in medieval times. Using our world as a source of high technology, those families were able to consolidate their power base thanks to illegal trading on behalf of cartels in our world. (Think about a parallel world without border guards…) One of the several wild cards in this scheme is the sudden re-appearance of one Miriam Beckstein, a long-lost relative who was unknowingly raised in our world as an orphan, eventually becoming a high-tech/business journalist before discovering her gifts and being coerced in the family business. The Family Trade delivered a lot of back-story and intrigue in a short time and The Hidden Family picks off right where the previous book ended, not an accidental choice given how both books were conceived as a while unit before being split for publication.

The first big twist of this installment, as hinted in the first volume, is that there is another world out there. Not just another America, roughly technologically equivalent to Victorian England, but another family of world-walkers waging war on the clans known to Miriam’s family. Our heroine is quick to seize upon this opportunity and see the potential profit margins in enabling technological transfers between more worlds. There are complications, of course: The regime at the other end is a totalitarian monarchy that wouldn’t take lightly to Miriam’s revolutionary ideas. And Miriam can’t go directly from here to there, but has to set up a transfer point in her family’s intermediate universe.

As if those new developments weren’t enough, Miriam’s power base in her family is still very much in jeopardy: Her secret love affair with a cousin is already material for blackmail, her relatives can’t stand her lack of manners, and even the senior members of her family are contemplating whether she’s bringing in more trouble than she’s worth. Palace intrigue, plots and counter-plots all unfold in complex patterns, even as a key member of Miriam’s family business plans treason and defection…

Fortunately, Stross’ crackling prose not only keeps all of those development as clear as possible, it makes reading the book an engrossing experience. This is one of those “just one more chapter” novels that hypnotize readers until the last page, leaving them wanting even more.

Plot-wise, this is almost as busy as the previous installment, and the ideas just keep on piling up. The interactions between the world are rich in implications: the doppelgangering of locations in dual worlds, for instance, is an idea that constantly reveals new facets. The economic implications of world-walking are cogently explored (even if only conceptually as of yet) while the realities of a renaissance-era world-view constantly rub Miriam the wrong way, offering a subtle counterpoint to the triumphant medievalism so prevalent in classical fantasy.

The Hidden Family is just the second installment in an ongoing series, so readers shouldn’t be surprised to find out that the end of this book only offers a respite of sorts for Miriam, just as other things go catastrophically wrong. There’s plenty of material for future plot threads here, and yet other possibilities remain unexplored for now, though I don’t doubt that Stross is busy preparing how best to integrate them in future installments.

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Jumper (2008)

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(In theaters, February 2008) Twice during this film, I thought I was hearing the opening strains of favorite songs, only to be disappointed with lame generic pop-rock. Much of the same holds true for Jumper as a film: Sometimes hinting at greatness, but constantly disappointing with lackluster execution. The premise itself is intriguing, setting up a young man with the power of teleportation, and then a larger mythology of “jumpers” and “paladins”. But little of it feels satisfying: In what I’m guessing is an effort to set up future sequels, few elements are developed, and whatever is explained doesn’t feel as if it fits together. (I’m thinking of genetic lines, mostly) But this mushiness also holds true on most other levels: Hayden Christiansen speaks with marbles in his mouth and his clumsy romantic scenes with Generic Girlfriend cause horrible flashbacks to Attack Of The Clones. Samuel L. Jackson is fabulous as usual, but the film doesn’t seem to understand what to do with him. The same also goes for the film’s dazzling variety of locations, which ultimately feels underwhelming and under-used: There are some poor plot choices for teleportation locations… heck, there are poor plot choices everywhere. (Remind me: Do they have to have seen the location they want to go to?) I’m still not convinced that director Doug Liman can tell a story cleanly without shaking his camera and overcutting his action scenes for no good reasons at all. There are some action scene here and there that should pop with kinetic excitement, but their cross-cutting silliness simply sucks away most of their energy. It doesn’t help that the script is so thin, and that it’s strangely empty of either fun or humor. I hope that some of the missing answers are in the book, but in the meantime the film is a disappointing example of wholly average entertainment. [One day later: Wow, the book is something else entirely.]

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In Bruges (2008)

[Poster]

(In theaters, February 2008) The problem with black comedies is that often, the darkness can snuff out the comedy. That’s what increasingly happens here, as the hilarious story of a pair of hit men waiting out an assignment in the picturesque Belgian city of Bruges is interrupted by violent flashbacks and gory deaths. As a comedy, In Bruges initially works well: There’s a nice absurdity to the misadventures of the hit men (Collin Farrel as an ADD-addled firebrand and Brendan Gleeson as an older veteran), the dialogs are fantastic and the unpredictable nature of the plotting is engrossing. This isn’t about real-world assassins, but an idealized, Pulp Fiction-infused ionic representation of murdering men with honor. In Bruges may not be a hilarious film, but it’s steadily amusing: racist midgets, anti-Bruges kvetching, a profane boss (Ralph Fiennes, wonderful), musings on the morality of killing bottled-armed people… it adds up. But what also adds up is an increasingly dark vein of violent developments, up to an including graphic deaths. While there’s an elegance to the way even smaller lines get their payoffs, there are also a few loose pieces in the mix: The girlfriend seems wasted once her plot function of providing a character with a gun is accomplished. The partially-blinded guy seemed destined for a bigger part. Even the ending, as ambiguous as it is, doesn’t completely satisfy. On the other hand, I don’t think that the city of Bruges will ever get a better promotional film.

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The Lincoln Lawyer, Michael Connelly

[Cover]

Little Brown, 2005, 404 pages, C$36.95 hc, ISBN 0-316-73493-X

Once again, it’s time for Michael Connelly to set aside protagonist Harry Bosch in favor of another character. Such “off-Bosch” novels are often the chance for Connelly to stretch a few writing muscles and try something different. The Lincoln Lawyer stands solidly in this tradition: Not only is it narrated by a very different character, but it’s also Connelly’s first outright legal thriller. It doesn’t spend much time in the courtrooms, but it’s all about the titular Lincoln lawyer, a defense attorney who’s forced to rediscover his moral compass.

Mickey Haller may be a new narrator, but he’s not completely unknown to those who have followed the Bosch series in detail. Although fleetingly mentioned in The Black Ice as Harry Bosch’s half-brother, this connection never comes into play in this novel (and the links to the rest of the Connellyverse are so tenuous as to be invisible), so don’t expect even a cameo by Connelly’s taciturn detective.

Not that any reader will wish for anything once The Lincoln Lawyer kicks into gear. Like most of Connelly’s novels so far, this is a ferocious page-turner, a perfect piece of entertainment designed to mesmerize its audience even as it slickly delivers the expected thrills.

The beginning may be slow, but it’s definitely intriguing: As Haller struggles with the demands of life as a lawyer in urban-sprawled Los Angeles (he conducts most of his business from the back-seat of his chauffeured car, hence the title of the book), readers will get a taste for the reality of his work. As in other Connelly novels, we get a heavy dose of jargon, common attitudes and specialized knowledge: Haller’s usual clients are of modest means, and he effortlessly outlines the daily routine of a lawyer trying to do the best with what he’s got. By the time a well-off man named Louis Rouet asks for legal representation in an ugly assault case, we’re fully aware how badly Haller can use a “franchise client” who will pay steady bills for a long time.

But Haller’s enthusiasm deflates once he begins to suspect his client’s innocence: “There is no client as scary as an innocent man” is the novel’s (fictional) epitaph, and that’s because nothing short of a not-guilty plea can be acceptable for an innocent: The usual options of “fair deals” with the prosecution become unavailable to lawyers representing an innocent man, and that’s the nightmare in which Heller finds himself even as rumbles about another innocent man unjustly convicted start echoing from his past.

Typically for Connelly, there are a number of further twists and turns in the tale, which piles on the complications as it plows forward. The procedural charm of Connelly’s prose now deals with the world of defense attorneys rather than LAPD policemen, but the impact is the same. By the time the surprising ending rolls around, Haller has learned as much as the reader, and Connelly emerges from his first legal thriller with honors.

It would be very unlikely to see Haller ride off in the sunset without expecting his return in a future novel. As Bosch himself approaches retirement and Connelly seemingly can’t resist the lure of linking his series, Haller would be a welcome addition to the policeman’s life, especially if the author ends up spending time examining how both half-brothers ended up on dissimilar sides of the law. As a character debut and a first attempt at another form of crime fiction, The Lincoln Lawyer is a remarkable effort, and it promises much more.

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Web Site Report – January 2008

Ready for another look at the hum-drum routine of an obscure web site? Here are the monthly highlights for christian-sauve.com:

1. Mmm. Numbers…

My prickly “Urchin” web stats engine tells me that…

Report for: christian-sauve.com, January 2008
Total Visitors       8,089
Total Pageviews     19,570
(Corrected total  11,344)
Total Hits          22,753
Total Bytes Transferred   441.8MB
Average Visitors Per Day  260.93
Average Pageviews Per Day 631
(Corrected average      366)
Average Hits Per Day      733.96

The “corrected” numbers take out the CSS, robots.txt, PDFs, mis-filed graphic files (ICO, GIF, JPG) and other non-public files mistakenly considered “pages” by the statistics pre-digestion engine. All numbers are roughly the same as last month.

But wait! This month, we’ve got another opinion. As a sop to nebulous “new year’s resolutions”, I decided to experiment with Google Analytics, installed the code, braced myself for bad news and peeked at the results at the end of the month.

At first glance, the results for January are catastrophic:

Google Analytics Data, December 2007:

  • Total Visits: 962
  • Total Pageviews: 1,439 (No correction necessary)

Ouch! What the heck just happened here? Is Google Analytics mad, malicious or just plain nuts?

Well, you’ll have to sit down through a few paragraphs of technical explanation to understand what’s going on:

My “Urchin” web stats report generator is what’s known as a “log file analyser”, looking at the information collected by my web server to figure out what’s going on. This is a valid approach (in fact, it’s a rock-solid way of looking at what the site is doing), but it does catch a lot of information that isn’t completely relevant to webmasters: It makes few differences between human visitors and robots from search engines and spammers, for instance. Worse: its support for the concept of “visit” is based on assumptions and approximations. Meanwhile, Google Analytics works by embedding a small amount of Javascript code on each page, code that refers to the Google site and provides more accurate information for those human visitors with Javascript-capable browsers. That necessarily means that Google Analytics will capture less data. On the other hand, what data it does capture will be richer than what’s recorded by Urchin.

Additionally, you have to remember that my version of Urchin was last updated in 2002. Interestingly, the company working on Urchin was then bought by Google and (after another merger) became Google Analytics in late 2005. Being fully centralized, Google Analytics is constantly being improved, and a major update took place in November 2007. This becomes important when considering recently-introduced user agents or the usage pattern of newer media such as blogs.

All of which to say that they are important differences between one and the other product. To investigate those differences myself, I grabbed a single day’s worth of web logs and started crunching numbers for comparison. “My” numbers for identifiable human visitors were about double that of Google, and 40% of what Urchin was telling me (with robots and spiders and everything). So there’s a lot of salt grains to be taken when considering the exact numbers reported by Google Analytics. Other other hand, trends and orders of magnitudes and information that’s not to be found in Urchin can be valuable if considered carefully… and it’s in that spirit that I’ll be comparing both set of results.

(But don’t expect me to get rid of Urchin, or web logs. In many cases, such as finding out what spammers are doing on the site, they offer information that will never be captured by Google.)

All of this being said, our top ten most popular pages according to Urchin are:

/index.html                    625
/texts/free-movie-tickets.htm  372
/reviews.html                  158
/about.html                    134
/contactt.html                 132
/reviews/2000/books00c.htm     120
/texts/solaris-explanation.htm 106
/reviews/1996/books96b.htm     105
/reviews/2002/books02d.htm     101
/search.html                   100

This is more or less the same ranking that we’ve seen for months. But let’s see what the human users tracked by Google Analytics are looking at:

1. /index.html 127
2. /reviews.html 109
3. /reviews/index.html 81
4. /texts/solaris-explanation.htm 53
5. /francais/index.html 43
6. /search.html 39
7. /texts/100films.htm 35
8. /about.html 33
9. /writings.html 33
10. /reviews/movies/2002.htm 29

Ignoring, for the moment, the humiliation of results that are a third of what Urchin is reporting, the slight differences here are fascinating. Google-tracked human users go for reviews and the review index. The “Solaris Explained” page is still popular (though the bounce rate of 94% is ferocious as users look at the page and feel no need to go exploring the rest of the site.) The contact page is practically ignored by human visitors, which confirms my suspicion of heavy spam spider activity. The Google Analytics results pass “real world” evaluation: I can believe, maybe more easily than the Urchin results, that those would in fact be the most-visited pages on the site.

If you care about such things, (and who would not?), here’s a look at browser statistics for the month (by visitors, last month’s results in parentheses):

Netscape|6  4701 (4128)
Explorer|7   965 (923)
Explorer|6   753 (1041)
msnbot|1     307 (261)
Explorer|5   148 (new)

Little change here. I’m guessing that a few people got new computers with IE7 over the holidays…

But Google Analytics offers another view:

1 IE 7.0 331
2 IE 6.0 240
3. Firefox 2.0.0.11 232

Dramatically different, isn’t it? A good thump to Mozilla triumphalism, right? But this shouldn’t be surprising: Most Netscape|6 hits, after all, are from the same spiders and robots that Google Analytics excludes from its calculations. Again, I have the feeling that Google Analytics (which is regularly updated with new user-agent information) is far more accurate in terms of what human visitors are actually using.

One Google Analytics report that I found unexpectedly fascinating is the “Bounce” data telling me how many visitors look at only one page, and then leave. Bounce isn’t necessarily bad: For pages that are popular with search engines, such as my “Solaris Explained” page, it’s perfectly OK if people come in, are enlightened and leave without looking at the rest of the site. Ideally, though, I would want them to stay for a while… but life’s short for everyone. In any case, I found that according to Google Analytics, most of my top-level pages had acceptable bounce rates, whereas some of my popular pages (such as the “Solaris Explained” page) had bounce rates in the eighties and nineties. As expected, really.

2. Where do these people come from?

Our top five sources of referrals (in visitors) were

google.com/search      966 (1021)
www.google.ca/search   254 (264)
google.co.uk/search    107 (112)
live.com/results.aspx   81 (new)
google.com/books        72 (new)

Interesting appearances of both live.com (the new Microsoft search engine) and of Google Books.

As you may expect by now, Google Analytics has a slightly different view of the situation:

1. google / organic 669
2. yahoo / organic 25
3. aol / organic 13
4. entropypump.wordpress.com / referral 10
5. books.google.com / referral 9

(Lingo key: “Organic” is Google’s way of saying that no one has paid for ads leading back to christian-sauve.com on those search engines. “Referral” is a direct link to this site.)

Keeping in mind that Google Analytics is optimized for maximizing Google Ad-Buys, there are a lot of interpretations built into the Google Analytics numbers. I suspect that all national Google sub-sites are aggregated together, and that a lot of number-crunching ensures that the data is “purer” than what can be deduced from server logs. Of course, Google Analytics provides me with a lot of extra information that Urchin doesn’t, such as “bounce rate” (people who only visit one page), “average time on site” (hocus-pocus calculation based on multiple page requests) and “new visits” (based on client-side cookie information)

In collecting referal information, Google Analytics seems noticeably stingier than Urchin. But keep in mind the “only tracking (most) human visitors” nature of its statistics: By nature, it’s built to miss a chunk of referals.

On the other hand, it does deliver very detailed information on the visits it does capture: Thanks to the Google Analytics data and some good old-fashioned number-crunching in Excel, I was able to build a bubble-chart (Using Bounce rate, Pages per visit and number of visitors as my data axes) that revealed that my “best referrals” are coming from Entropy Pump: People coming from that blog (10) visited an average of ten pages per visit (!) and only had a 20% bounce rate.

Visitors Bubble Chart

Big Blue Google, on the other hand, performed worse than the all-referrals average, sending me visitors that bounced more often and visited fewer pages per visit. (The “best” search engine, according to those metrics? Microsoft’s Live, which sent a tiny but relatively more curious bunch of visitors.) My collaborative blog, Fractale Framboise, also did well. Direct Traffic was also noticeably “better” than average . Which does actually smells like reality: People coming from Entropy Pump and Fractale Framboise are my target audience, and people directly coming to this site, presumably via bookmarks, are already familiar with the content and looking for more.

And this, frankly, goes straight to the heart of what web statistics are supposed to accomplish: Provide insight as to the nature of the web site’s visitors. Google delivers truckloads of visitors who aren’t interested in looking for more? Logical. Specialized blogs delivering pre-interested visitors? Sounds like an insight that can lead to further action!

In fact, it’s as I was contemplating Google Analytics data that I had either a revelation or a mini-stroke of insanity: If my review navigation pages are popular and if my readers are coming from review blogs, doesn’t it make sense to convert said review section to a more manageable blogging infrastructure? With the possibilities inherent to blog content management, RSS feed updates, specialized search engines and regular updates pressure, wounldn’t it be a better site if I dumped everything into a blog?

Why yes, it would be. I spent years resisting the allure of transforming this site into a blog, and it took a free analytics tools to convince me that it would be the way to go. And it meshes with a few nasty suspicions about my own work: A blog would allow harsh reader feedback, demand more regular updates, force me to write to a wider audience, push me in the spotlight of reader attention, and simply force me to step up my efforts.

Inspiring, isn’t it?

Of course, there are tons of things to do until then, not the least of which will be to dump eleven years’s worth of reviews into a back-dated database, create a template, come up with a tags-and-categories navigation architecture, catch up to the backlog and fiddle with the blog configuration. And once it’s up, I’ve got to feed the machine regularly. Eek.

So don’t expect any major change until this summer. But the seed of the idea has definitely been planted, and I’m off to investigate the possibilities of a newly-bloggish infrastructure. Keep reading these Site Reports for further updates.

Google Analytics tells me a bit more than Urchin about who those visitors are. For instance, it attempts to detect geographical location. Few people will be surprised to learn that most visitors come from the United States, followed by Canada, the UK, Ireland and Australia. Most people use Windows, followed by Macintosh then Linux. (But there was one iPhone visitor!) Most people have a 1024×768 screen resolution. Most people have FLash 9. Most people have Java. Most people connect using cable or DSL. While I don’t really trust the exact numbers, the aggregation seems reasonable to me. Trend analysis, once we have even more numbers, will be more important than precise numbers.

In the spirit of Web Analytics, here’s an amusing new link to this site: quantcast.com says, about christian-sauve.com, “This site reaches fewer than 2000 U.S. monthly uniques. The site caters to a primarily older, highly educated, rather male audience.” Eh, fair enough.

3. Ohh! Visitor comments!

Nothing worth sharing in the January mailbox. (It’s been a slow month.)

4. Search Queries Oddities

Here are our top-ten queries:

>patricia pearcy nude       19
>being canadian             12
>ayn rand                   11
>christian sauve            11
>movie sneak previews       11
>christian                  10
>solaris explained           9
>frank camper                8
>free movie premiere tickets 8
>that bringas woman          8

Meh. It’s the same old, same old!

But as it happens, Google Analytics has a different view on the month:

1. christian sauvé 9
2. that bringas woman 8
3. frank camper 8
4. solaris explained 6
5. solaris explanation 4
6. fuel injected dreams 3
7. glenn kleier 3
8. sequel to teeth of the tiger 3
9. solaris+ending 3
10. teeth of the tiger sequel 3

Some familiar search queries here, and results that don’t exceed the Urchin equivalent numbers, though some Urchin favourites are nowhere to be found here. Once again, I’m inclined to consider the Google Analytics numbers to be generally closer to meaninful reality than the Urchin ones. Speaking of reality, it helps that Ayn Rand is not listed in the Google Analytics numbers.

Until next time, my name is Christian Sauvé and I remain… obsessed by web statistics.

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